Venetian Palace, Blackshore on the Blyth 1914

Charles Rennie Mackintosh made this watercolor, Venetian Palace, Blackshore on the Blyth, using paper and paint as a kind of seeing-thinking process. What hits me is how the cool blues and grays give the work an ethereal, dreamlike quality. It is all about the washes, the texture of the paper coming through. Look at the way he’s built up the colors, layering and letting the paint do its thing. It’s almost like he’s not trying to control it too much. Check out the reflections in the water. See how the grays and whites mix, not trying to mimic reality exactly but hinting at it. I find the simplicity really powerful. There's a kinship I feel with someone like Agnes Martin here, in that it's about suggestion, feeling, and atmosphere over detail. Mackintosh uses color and form to create a mood, a sense of place, rather than just depicting a scene. The ambiguity is the point.